State now fingerprinting teachers

Sometime between writing lesson plans and enjoying summer vacation, most Massachusetts teachers will have to have their fingerprints taken as part of their preparations for the new school year.

The state now requires all public and private school employees — specifically all school personnel who may have unsupervised contact with children — to submit fingerprints for national and state background checks.

Previously, school districts used CORI checks, which do not show if an employee has a criminal record in another state. The law, state officials say, closes this loophole. (Also, CORI checks rely on a name-based search whereas the background checks use fingerprint data.)

Gov. Deval Patrick approved the law — An Act Relative to Background Checks — more than a year ago, but the FBI called for revisions to allow access to the national fingerprint and criminal history database, delaying the rollout.

Patrick signed the changes into the law in September 2013 and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education accepted them to make Massachusetts the last state to mandate comprehensive background checks for employment in its school systems.

It was not until early this year that school districts began preparing for the new policy.

"The struggle of this new process has greatly impacted (the) time (we can) spend on other pressing needs," said Jill Haskins, assistant to Bellingham Public Schools Superintendent Edward Fleury. "Many districts are looking at adding a HR person or reconfiguring staff."

Last month, MorphoTrust, the Billerica company the state contracted to process the fingerprints, "printed" roughly 15,000 school workers, according to Denny Wear, a senior director of program management overseeing Massachusetts account.

The first phase of the rollout requires new hires to undergo the expanded background checks, a group that includes some 200,000 people.

MorphoTrust anticipates fingerprinting an estimated 500,000 school employees over the next two years. The state aims to have all employees fingerprinted by the beginning of the 2016-17 school year.

"It’s certainly achievable with the network we have," Wear said.

That includes 25 fingerprinting centers across the state, he said, with plans to add five more in the next two years to meet the demand.

The fingerprints are sent first to the state police for the state background check and then on to the FBI. The state Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, an agency within the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, usually receives the results two to three days after submission and forwards the reports to the school districts.

Under state regulations, the grounds for revocation of an educator’s license include if the teacher has pleaded guilty to, been convicted of, or received a deferred sentence for "a crime involving moral turpitude" or one that "discredits the profession, brings the license into disrepute or lacks good moral character."

MorphoTrust stipulated that it only conducts the fingerprinting and cannot access the results of a background check.

To register for fingerprinting, school employees make an appointment through a website (identogo.com). Teachers must pay a $55 fee, while non-certified employees, such as janitors and bus drivers pay $35.

Framingham Public Schools Superintendent Stacy Scott said employees hired for the 2013-14 school year had to sign a statement acknowledging they were aware of the fingerprinting policy and the associated fees.

The district had looked at picking up the cost for teachers, Scott said, but nothing has been finalized.

Framingham’s situation mirrors those of other districts, where debates about who should pay up continue to play out.

Asking the employees to foot the bill for fingerprinting has been one of the more contentious aspects of the law and one that concerns the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

"It’s an unfunded state mandate that’s landing on the backs of our members," said MTA President Barbara Madeloni. The MTA has urged local unions to raise the subject during contract negotiations.

The MTA’s general stance on the fingerprinting advocates for membership to comply because, "it’s the law," Madeloni said.

But the association has questioned the effectiveness of fingerprinting teachers.

"I don’t know that there’s any evidence that the fingerprinting being done in other states has protected children," Madeloni said. "Has this, in other states, reduced instances of child abuse?"

Still, state officials have praised the law as "common sense" and necessary to children’s safety. Former Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville, now a professor at Harvard, has said that the law makes it possible for every child to know "they have a safe and secure space to learn and grow."

In helping to draft the legislation, state Rep. Alice Peisch, D-Wellesley, said she saw how without the law, school districts could be vulnerable.

"The need for this (law) was brought to my attention by a number of people connected to public safety, because of incidents where people had been employed by public school districts with criminal records outside of Massachusetts," said Peisch, chairwoman of the House Education Committee. "The CORI checks did not pick those people up."

Matt Tota can be reached at 508-634-7521 or mtota@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @matttotamdn.

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